Strauss & co - 2015 Mid-year Review

Alexis Preller Mapogga Wedding Sold R1 477 840, 16 March 2015 Walter Battiss Untitled Sold R477 456, 1 June 2015 In the painting Mapogga Wedding (1952) Alexis Preller is caught between a mystically informed and hieratic consciousness on the one hand and the symbolisation of marriage among the Mapogga on the other. There is, to be sure, some anthropological delight in his depiction of the exotic detail associated with the institution – the isiyaya or beaded veil, the decorative detail worked into the marriage blankets worn by bride and groom, the brass arm rings worn in ostentation of prosperity, the rhythms of purest white dotting the picture plane – but there are also timeless dramas playing out. Teasingly these come to the fore in the serpentine sweep of ribbons, binding the celebrants together at the same time as they articulate plastic form and movement across the canvas’ surface, reading the traceries of decorous life into a space dominated at the psychological level by the ancient and brooding figures of the old women in the background. Preller’s command of a specifically African form is masterly, built in the hieratic gravitas of his tableau and atavistically expressive power of the mask (the groom’s empty eyed presence, the jealous presence of the gogo figures) especially as relieved and nuanced interruption in the pondering gaze of the bride. While much of Preller is personalised and arcane to the point of being impenetrable, here he is traversing a zone of collective consciousness in which cosmology is written into the hieratic, and that elusive African sensibility that was always the artist’s goal becomes palpable, immediately and generously real – in what is a quiet triumph of pictorial design. Many of the finest of Walter Battiss’ paintings are also his most childlike and visually direct. In his Untitled , using pictorial languages reminiscent of Catalan painter, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse in equal measure, the artist – an inveterate traveller, driven by unfailing curiosity and openness to sensation – conjures up a zone of pure and sybaritic sensation, played out in primitive shape and playfully meandering line. It might be kids’ stuff , but it is so only in the sense of an infectuously childlike delight in the warm tickling you get from beach sand between the toes on a summer’s day without the least thought of the morrow… 16